Google & YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them. For shame.
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So the lesson is: Being ethical in one way is hard, so don't bother being ethical in any aspect of your life?
Whether buying hardware or working for google is worse is another debate, but you should be able to see why people can work at google and not necessarily feel guilty about it.
The truth is most for-profit organization will not have a flawless ethical image that satisfied everyone, and that probably includes your employer. I'm not saying we should all look the other way, but let's keep things grounded in reality. Censorship is a delicate subject, especially as it concerns expressions involvong multiple cultures. This doesn't make Google immediately evil for electing to / not electing to act one way or another.
Maybe your accusation is that Google is choosing profit over ethics in this case? Then the "Chinese hardware" argument has to come into play. Are you, yourself choosing price and convenience when you know it means your dollars are ending up in those poorly run Chinese factories? What are you going to do about it? Should Googlers quit their jobs before or after you source all your hardware from ethically run, blame-free factories?